Ever since ever, I’ve been a strong advocate of
old-school parenting – where the child is taught that the world does not
revolve around him. I strongly believe
that a child ought to be taught to serve her elders, as a means of nipping in
the bud any form of self-absorption or sense of entitlement. And I’ve always considered it acceptable to
allow a child to fall down and pick himself up on his own.
That’s why I absolutely love
this article.
I’m learning that parenting is a fine balance between expressing unconditional
love for the child while simultaneously maintaining a level of
indifference. Crazy, right?
The child needs to learn that the parents won’t always be
there to save the day. And this requires us to force ourselves to turn away
when they are going through painful experiences. Obviously, it doesn’t mean
that I turn my back on them when they are in dire need, but I need to give them
space to fall down and get back up:
Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at
Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his
book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent
Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called
him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”
“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,”
he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how
to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and
struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid
doesn’t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I
know of one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so
instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to
drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no
experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect
situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to
unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”
Also I really believe that so much of this helicopter
parenting, where the parents hover over the child, is about parents and their
inability to create a life outside of their nuclear homes. With the extended family having gone the way
of the 8-track and box-set televisions, higher divorce rates leaving parents
isolated, as well as social circles becoming smaller and smaller, too many
parents have nothing but their children left as social outlets:
We have less community nowadays—we’re more isolated as
adults, more people are divorced—and we genuinely like spending time with our
kids. We hope they’ll think of us as their best friends, which is different
from parents who wanted their kids to appreciate them, but didn’t need them to
be their pals. But many of us text with our kids several times a day, and would
miss it if it didn’t happen. So instead of being peeved that they ask for help
with the minutiae of their days, we encourage it.”
As a homeschooling parent, I embarrassingly admit that I have my
hovering skills pretty much in high gear.
My wife and I are constantly aware of our children’s state of
being. We are greatly involved in their
daily activities. But the greatest
difference, I believe, between my style and that of my counterparts profiled in
this article is my lack of constant approval.
I try to balance my ‘shabaash’ and ‘atta boys’ with
‘you’re work is terrible’ and ‘get out of my face!’
Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also
risen in tandem with self-esteem. Why is this? “Narcissists are happy when
they’re younger, because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains.
“Their parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they
choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their
children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of
their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about
themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”
The old-school father in me has always felt comfortable
in setting limits for my kids. And with
kids being kids, these limits are always being tested, but it’s essential that
the parent be prepared to say no and simply walk away. Tears may be shed and emotions will be high,
but the principle always overrides these temporary fits of emotion.
But the one place where I clearly feel I have fallen
short is in giving my kids too many choices.
I am always waffling between giving them the ‘responsibility’ to make
adult choices and forcing decisions upon them.
Am I properly balancing this act?
Not sure.
As a parent, I’m all too familiar with this. I never
said to my son, “Here’s your grilled-cheese sandwich.” I’d say, “Do you want
the grilled cheese or the fish sticks?” On a Saturday, I’d say, “Do you want to
go to the park or the beach?” Sometimes, if my preschooler was having a
meltdown over the fact that we had to go to the grocery store, instead of
swooping him up and wrestling him into the car, I’d give him a choice: “Do you
want to go to Trader Joe’s or Ralphs?” (Once we got to the market, it was “Do
you want the vanilla yogurt or the peach?”) But after I’d set up this paradigm,
we couldn’t do anything unless he had a choice. One day when I said to him,
“Please put your shoes on, we’re going to Trader Joe’s,” he replied
matter-of-factly: “What are my other choices?” I told him there were no other
choices—we needed something from Trader Joe’s. “But it’s not fair if I don’t
get to decide too!” he pleaded ingenuously. He’d come to expect unlimited
choice.
When I was my son’s age, I didn’t routinely get to
choose my menu, or where to go on weekends—and the friends I asked say they
didn’t, either. There was some negotiation, but not a lot, and we were content
with that. We didn’t expect so much choice, so it didn’t bother us not to have
it until we were older, when we were ready to handle the responsibility it
requires. But today, Twenge says, “we treat our kids like adults when they’re
children, and we infantilize them when they’re 18 years old.”
And finally, I completely agree with this concluding
statement:
“In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly
happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up.
Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some letting
go.”
One more thought. Throughout my entire reading of this
lengthy piece, I was overcome by the lack of spiritual discipline that exists
for so many of these families. I’m
assuming that many of them may be church-going regulars, but sadly Christianity
is completely lacking on this front. One
of the pillars of Islamic teaching is the constant battlefront we must maintain
against our nafs. And when this is a
foundational teaching in the home, I’m convinced that many of these issues of
narcissism, depression, low self-esteem, and what not can be better addressed.
